Tag Archives: race

In this panorama of a predominantly Black community in Brooklyn, Lee himself plays a delivery man for an Italian-American pizzeria owner. Entangled in the looming racial tensions (and confrontational shot/reverse shots), he soon finds himself at the center of an escalating conflict on the hottest day of the year.

We’re delighted to present a free preview screening of this socially conscious horror flick. A young black man heads upstate to meet his white girlfriend’s parents, where he makes a series of increasingly disturbing discoveries.

The second event of the Social Death and Survival: Race/Sex/Gender/Vulnerability Series.

Come to continue discussing social death with Dr. Lisa Marie Cacho’s lecture, “Lawful Injustice: Punishing ‘Status Crimes’ Without Penalty.” Dr. Cacho is an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is the author of “Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected.”

Visitors to Olin Library might find themselves greeted with a pink slip this morning that has nothing to do with the firing of librarian Pat Tully. In four Onion-style news snippets, an anonymous satirical newsletter titled “Burdening the Beast” takes jabs at different university issues surrounding race.

So maybe you’re a freshman, nervous and overwhelmed by all the information coming at you about classes, housing, what to bring from home – and are feeling like you can’t even begin to think about bigger issues on campus. Or maybe you’re a senior and feel like you’ve gotten this far and never really involved yourself in any social/political engagement on campus, so now it’s way too late and where would you even begin if you wanted to. Wherever you might stand, activism at Wes can seem like a huge, widespread and unnavigable thing.

Thankfully, some very committed students are trying to change that sentiment and make activism within the Wesleyan world an approachable and cohesive community. This past week, the Disorientation Guide was released through the University Organizing Centersite to bring together the wide-ranging issues affecting us into one document. The entire Disorientation zine can be downloaded here, and I strongly recommend that everyone take a look at it.

LOOSE is an autobiographical examination of how gender expression, and racial identity affect each other when we navigate public space. Conversations with other gender non-conforming people of color are captured and turned into a live documentary performance that also blends the practices DJ remixing techniques and live video mixing. It explores a concept of remixing as: 1) a process of mental and physical image appropriation and 2) a mode of existence and survival, which turn everyday interactions into a creative act. LOOSE is designed to be improvisational. No two performances are the same.

D’hana Perry is a DJ, event creator and a recent recipient of an MFA candidate in Media Art from Emerson College. Their work explores liminal identity construction, gender/racial performance and self-expression. For more about their other work, check out chubrubproductions.com.

Almost three years ago exactly, I showed up to my first Eclectic concert, as a wide-eyed, naive pre-frosh, a total stranger to the “college music scene.” There was loud, thrashy music coming from the ballroom, where a small crowd was gathered. While dancing wildly around with all these strange older cool college kids, I thought to myself, “Wow! I am actually doing this. I am a skinny, lanky dude moshing! And it feels great! And I should totally come here and do this more!” And the rest was, as they say, history.

On Sunday, October 27th from 3 – 5 PM at the Malcolm X House Lounge, we will have the third of the Privilege and Policy at Wesleyan series. The discussion will cover how race impacts the Wesleyan experience in both implicit and explicit ways, with topics like racial profiling by public safety and police officers, assumptions about class made based on skin color, the history of and role of the Student of Color community on campus- anything you want to talk about, we’re down to discuss. We invite all students to join us to share their experiences, come up with ideas for change, and meet other students who care about how race affects the Wesleyan experience.

On Wednesday night, students, faculty, and staff gathered in Tischler Hall of the Exley Science Center for the second Diversity University forum of the year. This program, entitled “Diversity University: In the Classroom and Beyond,” was a follow-up to last semester’s forum, “In Theory and In Practice.”

From the very start, it was clear that the atmosphere of this forum was very different from the first one. Not only were there fewer people in attendance, the emotional level, though high, was distinctly more subdued. Clearly this time of year is particularly busy for Wesleyan students, and I can only imagine that that was a major factor in keeping the numbers down. But there was also not the same feeling of urgency, the immediate need for such a gathering—which, all in all, is probably a good thing.

Last fall’s forum was organized in the wake of a series of upsetting incidents of attacks on students, and subsequent issues of racism, targeting, and exclusion that arose from conversations, Public Safety reports, and WesACB threads. In Wednesday’s forum, while there was an expression of similar concerns and issues of diversity, but there was not the same shocking outpouring of powerful emotion.

I never had a plan for this movie. All I knew was that I wanted to make a documentary about Public Safety. After having gotten approval from the organization, my first instinct was to humanize P-Safe, as it is an institution that is generally maligned by the student body. A wave of on-campus assaults had just occurred within a single week, and I was interested to discover what P-Safe was doing to handle the situation and protect students. But the alerts P-Safe had sent out described the suspects as “African-American” and “male,” and unbeknownst to me at the time, these email alerts were met with a slew of racial hatred on Wesleyan’s Anonymous Confession Board. It was then revealed that a P-Safe officer had allegedly assaulted a black Wesleyan student. A week later, a forum on student diversity and equality was held in Wesleyan’s Beckham Hall.

These conflicts and contradictions form the basis of Billinkoff’s film, which largely speaks for itself. It’s only twelve minutes, so watch it after the jump.